
- | DURECT
Here’s What 4 Biopharma CFOs Think About The Future Of Remote Work
Office interactions are definitely an important way to foster relationships between coworkers, establish and maintain a corporate culture, and foster creative thinking. This is particularly relevant when a company onboards new employees. However, new technologies, such as the wide-spread use of high-quality video meeting platforms, have enabled us to replace the in-person interactions to some extent and have made most of us more efficient and organized at times. While I don’t envision a future business organization that lacks an office environment entirely, I believe now that everyone has been forced to learn how to get things done in a virtual environment, and that biotechs will adopt a hybrid model of in-person and virtual interactions.

- | Anima Biotech
Biopharma Executive Perspectives on 2021
“The biggest thing that is really happening in the biotech industry…there is a new rich source of drugs. There is a goldmine, called mRNA, that some diggers have been digging for 30 years, finding a very small part of it,” said Yochi Slonim, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Anima Biotech, which is advancing ‘Translation Control Therapeutics,’ the first and only platform for the discovery of small molecule drugs that control mRNA translation.

- | Immuneering
Health-Care Venture Capitalists Raised Record Total in 2020
Immuneering Corp., a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup that uses computational technology for drug discovery, completed a $62 million Series B round. Cormorant Asset Management led the financing, which included participation from Surveyor Capital, Rock Springs Capital, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Perceptive Advisors and LYFE Capital.

- | Compugen
Using Computational Discovery to Build Better Immunotherapies
Compugen is using a computational discovery platform to identify proteins and pathways that drive immune resistance mechanisms to checkpoint inhibitors. We spoke to Anat Cohen-Dayag, CEO of Compugen, about the company’s discovery platform, its efforts to develop new treatments that address patients who don’t respond to current checkpoint inhibitors, and its clinical pipeline in development.

- | Avadel
What We Know About Narcolepsy, Sodium Oxybate Use, Salt Intake & Cardiovascular Risk
The review received financial support from Avadel Pharmaceuticals, which recently filed a new drug application with the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) for a once-nightly formulation of sodium oxybate. Sodium oxybate is currently available with twice-nightly dosing from Jazz Pharmaceuticals under the brand name Xyrem. Jazz recently received FDA approval for narcolepsy drug Xywav (calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium oxybates), which has 92% less sodium content than Xyrem.

- | Immuneering
Immuneering secures $62M series B to advance tech-driven pipeline
Immuneering Corp., a bioinformatics specialist that has for years helped big companies like Teva Pharmaceutical Ltd. and Bristol Myers Squibb Co. better understand their own medicines, has landed $62 million in an oversubscribed series B financing that will help it leverage lessons learned in that journey to build out its own pipeline, starting with IMM-1-104, a dual inhibitor of MEK and a related target.

- | Clene Nanomedicine
Clene goes public with gold-based neurology nanotechnology
Biotech Clene Nanomedicine has gone public with a mission to use nanotherapeutics that will use gold to treat devastating neurological diseasesincluding Parkinson’s disease.

- | Immuneering
Immuneering, Terns raise crossover rounds as IPO queue stands to grow again
With crossover investors lining up to participate, biotechs Immuneering and Terns each raised…